anandamayi ma. 179
time, it became Ma and God, the duality. It took years to identify Ma with God as
One. And it took place because of fantastic experiences and dramatic situations. But
for Ma there is no beginning and end to the story. It is all her lila.”
One such fantastic experience that obviously became a part of the family’s per-
ception of Ma was reported by Gita Bose:
My grandfather was a doctor from the medical school in Calcutta. There were only
ten of them at that time sitting around Ma. All of a sudden grandfather started feel-
ing drowsy, and he thought, Why am I feeling like that? I just got up from an af-
ternoon sleep. His eyes just closed all of a sudden. And then he opened them
forcibly, and he saw there was no Ma. And in the place of Ma, there was one of the
tenavatarasof Devi. The form he saw was Chinnamasta. You know, the body was
here, and the head she is holding in her hand. He saw that form, and the nine other
people, they each saw a different form. And another devotee was a judge. He saw
all ten forms. And after that the drowsiness went away. And everybody asked each
other, “What have you seen? I don’t know what to think!” And the judge said, “I
saw all ten forms.” And they ran to him and said, “You are so lucky!” My grand-
father told me this when I was little.Regardless of whether devotees thought of God as an incarnation of Devi, of
Krishna, or of the formless Brahman, she was to each of them the means and the
goal of spiritual life.
How were Anandamayi Ma’s female devotees affected by God coming in the
form of a woman? In most of my interviews with Ma’s women devotees, after they
had told me that Ma was not a woman, not a saint or guru, but was God incarnate,
I asked them why God had chosen to come into this world as a woman. They had
no problem answering. They all agreed: “Ma came for the ladies.” It became clear,
however, that they did not mean that Ma came to show women how to be. Rather
they were saying that God ’s taking female form as Ma enabled women in particular
to be physically close to the divine.
Rupa Vishvanathan, a householder devotee, said, “There are so many rascals
masquerading in the garb of a renunciant, taking advantage of women. It is utterly
safe to be with Mother. You are always closer to Mother than to Father. You can con-
fide; it ’s very intimate.” Sita, another householder devotee said, “God takes the
form of sometimes Father, sometimes Mother. Some are more comfortable with
Mother. I am. We can touch her, massage her legs. Ma used to lie down, and one per-
son would be massaging her arms, and one person her legs, and we would all be talk-
ing and laughing. You see, intimacy like that you cannot get except with the Mother.